On Nov. 19, two weeks after Election Day, Elon Musk demonstrated perhaps the most brutal, if not sadistic, technique for making life in the federal civil service intolerable.
A Wall Street Journal headline from Nov. 22 captures the situation well: “Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers.”
What happened? Musk had reposted a tweet declaring, “I don’t think the U.S. Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.” Musk added a comment, echoing the language of the president-elect: “So many fake jobs.”
Musk’s tweet, which was viewed by 33.2 million people, described Ashley Thomas, a 37-year-old who, The Journal reports, holds “engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford” and works as the “little-known director of climate diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which advises “private companies to fund ways to improve living standards in developing countries.” A Finance Corporation official told The Journal that Thomas’s work “is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”
As evidence mounted that Thomas’s job was under threat, she sought to pull herself out of the spotlight, taking down all of her social media accounts.
The social media excoriation of public sector employees is just one way that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists are using to destroy what they see as strongholds of the left in government and academia.
Despite their owners’ protestations to the contrary, the fear of retribution from Trump and his allies appears, at least to me, to have prompted two major newspapers, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, to decline to endorse anyone in the presidential contest.
Similarly, corporate America — also seemingly in recognition of Trump’s explicit threats to punish adversaries — nearly doubled its support for Trump to $660.5 million in 2024, up from 358.2 million in 2020. Business support for President Biden was $563.3 million in 2020, and it was $450.8 million for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.
In further anticipation of a vengeful Trump-led administration, companies are “scrubbing left-leaning policies from their websites and scoping out appearances on conservative podcasts,” The Journal reported last week.
With Trump and his allies on the move, organizations that rose after the 2016 election to fight the Trump administration have largely folded their tents, at least for now. “The anti-Trump movement,” Politico reported shortly after Nov. 5, “is in tatters. Now it’s scrambling to remain relevant.”
In fact, preliminary signs — “Anti-Trump Burnout: The Resistance Says It’s Exhausted,” as my colleagues in the newsroom put it — suggest that the liberal opposition is doing just what Timothy Snyder, a historian at Yale who has written extensively about Hitler and Stalin, warned against: “Do not obey in advance.”
The early coercive pressures applied by Trump loyalists are a taste of what is to come, starting on Jan. 20, 2025. Forces on the right have adopted an extraordinary agenda that, even if it is not a resounding success, is sure to inflict damage on cherished pillars of liberalism and the Democratic Party.
Trump — convinced that top government employees in such agencies as the Department of Justice and the C.I.A. are out to get him — is the driving force behind this assault. This time, however, he will have numerous allies in key government positions equally committed to the annihilation of the deep state.
Take the federal civil service. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Russell Vought, Trump’s designated director of the Office of Management and Budget, declared in a speech sponsored by the Center for Renewing America before the election. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”
Vought said the Trump administration must wage war against an alliance of the Democratic Party and the American left, committed to the destruction of our country:
The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country,” Vought argued, “in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us. And they are going to continue to aim it until they no longer have to win elections.
Not to be outdone, Kash Patel, Trump’s choice to head the F.B.I., described his plans to Steve Bannon last year:
We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we are going come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We are going to come after you, whether it is criminal or civil, we’re figuring that out. But yeah, we are putting you on notice. Steve, this is why they hate us, this is why we are tyrannical, this is why we are dictators.
In this struggle, who are the targets?
The list is long, often focusing on academia, especially on elite universities like Harvard, Yale and Stanford; in fields such as sociology and psychology; on sanctuary cities; the nonprofit sector, which employs 12.8 million people with an annual payroll of $873.1 million; on the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants; on the three major television networks that are not Fox; the top ranks of the Justice Department, the C.I.A. and the armed forces; on the array of civil rights enforcement departments embedded throughout the public and private sectors; and on the already faltering Diversity, Equity and Inclusion nests in corporations across America.
While not all the attacks will survive legal challenges, the methods may well include taxing university endowments, changing accreditation rules, deploying the military as part of the roundup of illegal immigrants, especially in sanctuary cities, claiming a national emergency to justify such action; demands for resignations of top departmental personnel by newly appointed cabinet members; reductions in force to lay off federal employees; an attempt to reclaim presidential authority to impound congressionally appropriated funds; the creation by executive order of Schedule F — a classification for senior federal workers who implement policies, write regulations and enforce the rules — eliminating their civil service job protections.
Here is an example of the determination of Trump’s potential appointees.
Mike Johnston, the Democratic mayor of Denver, told Denverite, a local news website, that he would do all he could to protect undocumented immigrants in the city who were threatened with deportation by the Trump administration. Tom Homan, Trump’s choice to become “border czar,” countered, “Me and the Denver mayor, we agree on one thing. He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail.”
Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia, described the scope of the incoming president’s agenda by email:
Even more than in President Trump’s first term, the incoming Trump-Vance Administration appears poised to use both personal and institutional mechanisms to intimidate and suppress perceived enemies, including those in business, nonprofit civil society organizations, universities and the federal government.
In the case of higher education, Hertel-Fernandez continued, the administration
has already signaled interest in deploying a variety of strategies to control and pressure institutions of higher education, including not just universities that have already been under fire at the state level but also private institutions. These strategies include weaponizing the U.S. Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security and Justice, including using tools involving civil rights enforcement, research funding, accreditation and visa access for international students.
Hertel-Fernandez pointed out that just the possibility of punitive action can be effective:
We know from comparative research that often simply the threat of government intervention can silence or intimidate potential enemies of would-be authoritarian leaders.
We’ve already seen reports about the fear that leaders in business, higher education and philanthropy have about speaking out against the incoming government.
Pre-emptive retreat and silencing is also a major concern to the health of a well-functioning independent civil service in the federal government. In addition to the direct threat that implementation of so-called ‘Schedule F’ will pose to the nonpartisan, technical expertise that our federal government relies on, the Trump-Vance Administration and their allies have already made clear their strategy of relying on intimidation — especially mediated through online platforms and social media — to bully and threaten civil servants who seek to preserve the rule of law and speak truth to power.
If The Chronicle of Higher Education is a barometer of academic response to the Trump victory, there are signs that rather than reacting in anger, the mood is now one of introspection, an evaluation of how we reached this point.
In a Nov. 21 essay, “Academe’s Divorce From Reality: Americans Are Fed Up, and Not Just People Who Voted for Trump,” William Deresiewicz, who taught British fiction at Yale and is the author of “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” wrote:
The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before Nov. 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Trump, he said, “is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.”
With a broad brush, Deresiewicz blamed “the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the ‘studies’ programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities and the liberal-arts colleges.”
In a similarly reflective mood, Daron Acemoglu, a Nobel-winning economist at M.I.T., posted a long thread on X in which he argues that liberalism began, in part, as “a philosophy of a criticism of how power was exercised by traditional economic and political elites. So my hypothesis is that liberalism failed because it came to power and it did not adjust to this new reality. It became too dominant and not sufficiently self-critical.”
Even through the Reagan administration, Acemoglu wrote,
three tenets of New Deal liberalism survived and gradually became stronger: (1) cultural liberalism, with emphasis on individualism, autonomy and progressive cultural attitudes; (2) the empowerment of educated elites, in the form of both technocracy and meritocracy but going beyond just technical matters and extending to issues such as moral values; (3) an emphasis on establishing procedures for predictable implementation of laws and regulations.
What is the problem? “The ascendance of these three tenets — without adequate opposition — is the source of liberalism’s failure,” Acemoglu writes. It is “one thing to defend minorities; it’s an entirely different thing to impose values on people who do not hold them (for example, telling people what language they can and cannot use). Without the adequate balance of power, cultural liberalism shifted more and more toward the latter.”
These and other excesses by the left created, in Acemoglu’s words,
the impression among many people that liberalism is hectoring them, is arrogantly putting them down and is not even efficient in what it attempts to do. It is true some of this discontent is manufactured by talk shows and right-wing media and social media. But some of it is real.
The success or failure of Trump’s bid to use the government as a weapon against the left is likely to be determined by the extent to which his appointees can gain control of the federal regulatory and grant-making apparatus.
Steven Brint, a sociologist at the University of California, Riverside, pointed out in an email that “in theory, the federal government holds a large lever over academe. That lever consists of more than $111 billion in financial aid to colleges and universities and about $55 billion in research funding.”
Brint noted that during his first term, Trump “proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as cuts to the science agencies. These proposals went nowhere, and I don’t think they will go anywhere this time, either.”
The difference in 2025, however, is that Trump will try to use Schedule F to put his own appointees into jobs that oversee the distribution of financial and other resources, in part to move them from liberal to conservative institutions and arenas.
One liberal project Trump is determined to stamp out is the valorization of what has come to be known as D.E.I. — diversity, equity and inclusion — which the consulting firm McKinsey describes as “three closely linked values held by many organizations that are working to be supportive of different groups of individuals, including people of different races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders and sexual orientations.”
In brief, those values represent everything Trump and his MAGA troops now seek to eliminate from American life.
In a Nov. 29 article, “Trump Team Has Ivy League in Sight as It Gears Up Attacks on D.E.I.,” Bloomberg reported that Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a muscular critic of D.E.I., was invited to Mar-a-Lago to brief Trump officials. According to Bloomberg, Rufo proposes
to tie federal funding to ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs at all public and private universities. Potential restrictions could threaten billions of dollars of federal funds that Ivy League colleges secure every year for research and other areas. Harvard alone received $686 million during the past academic year, its largest source of support for research.
“I hope the president turns the screws on D.E.I. in the Ivy Leagues,” Rufo told Bloomberg. “This would put conditions on federal funding, especially the Ivy Leagues, if they practice discrimination regarding D.E.I.”
“If you don’t stop discriminating and violating the law, you will no longer be qualified for federal funding,” Rufo continued. “I think that that is the way forward and that universities would buckle immediately.”
In the view of Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at N.Y.U. and the author of the book “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” MAGA has already won half the battle. In an email she wrote:
Our democracy has sadly already devolved into a “captured” state, certainly as concerns the judiciary, thanks to the diligent work of the Federalist Society and state-level G.O.P. machinery, as well as the Supreme Court, which handed Trump what autocrats such as Viktor Orban, premier of Hungary, have to work years to achieve: immunity for “official acts” even if those involve sending a SEAL team to execute a political assassination plan.
The next step, according to Ben-Ghiat, would be taming the media:
We can expect Trump & Co. to use pressure, lawsuits, “creative” application of regulations, threat and all the other autocratic tools to transform the landscape of media and institutions so that opposition voices have smaller reach, are more muted (including by self-censorship due to threats) and are replaced, increasingly, by an even more souped-up “fire hose of falsehood.”
Gordon Abner, a professor of public policy at the University of Texas, Austin, similarly argued by email that in some respects, American institutions have already begun to accede to Trump:
I don’t think Trump has to change as many laws, rules and regulations as people think. Corporations, universities and nonprofits are already getting rid of D.E.I. without Trump having to do anything other than use his oratory skills. Many leaders either agree with his messaging and/or believe their clients and donors agree. Universities are already weakening their tenure policies, and accreditation standards require that universities adhere to the law, so if states or the federal government pass laws and regulations championed by Trump, accreditation would only have to mirror it.
Abner contended:
The biggest open secret is that Trump’s message genuinely resonates with people, and Democrats need to accept that and unpack it without denigrating those who support his message, which is not working. So, to the extent that liberalism is undermined, it is not just because of Trump. It is because many Americans want autocratic leadership or fear standing up to an authoritarian leader, which is a hard pill to swallow. Maybe we are not as exceptional as we think.
What is most concerning about Trump, Abner continued,
is not that he will do things that are illegal because what does illegal mean at this point? What is most concerning is that he will extend his power lawfully and that if and possibly when he publicly bullies and intimidates everyday American citizens and leaders of institutions, there will not be enough good people in positions of power to say that it is wrong and profoundly un-American.
From what we know so far, it appears that Abner may be right.
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